The lead author of an alarming report credited with helping to persuade President Donald Trump to change course and take the coronavirus outbreak more seriously says he is now self-isolating after displaying symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Neil Ferguson, an infectious-disease expert at Imperial College London
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I have Reviewed Neil Ferguson’s Code – It’s a Joke
I have been asked by a source in Britain to review the Ferguson model code for my opinion. Just so everyone has some idea, the original program used by Ferguson was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” and by no means is this remotely sophisticated. I seriously doubt that Imperial College will want to go public with the code because it is that bad. To put this is some perspective, just the core code to conduct basic analysis in Socrates is about 150,000 lines of code. It is so complicated, it takes a tremendous amount of concentration to try to see the paths it has available to it for basic analysis.
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To try to keep this in trader’s terms, reviewing the code reveals this is just a stochastic which is INCAPABLE of forecasting high, low, or projected price target expected to be achieved. Any trader knows that a stochastic is a trend following measure not a forecaster of the trend nor a projection tool to say when a market is over bought or oversold. This clearly shows the vast chasm between trading models and academic models where money is never on the line. The documentation even states:
“The model is stochastic. Multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour.”
Ttyrttt
“Stochastic” is simply defined as “randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” In other words, they begin with a presumption and therein lies the FIRST error. Ferguson’s assumption was wrong to begin with. Then this mode is so old, they recommend that it be run only on a single CORE processor as if we were dealing with an old IBM XT.
Effectively, you start the program with what is called a “seed” number which is then used to produce a random number. Most children’s games begin this way. In face, this is a version of what you would be similar to the game SimCity where you create a city starting from scratch and it simulates what might happen based upon the beginning presumption. There are numerous bugs in the code and the documentation suggests to run it several times and take the average. This is just unthinkable! A program should produce the same result with the same data from which it begins. Therefore, there is no possible way this model would ever produce the same results. In reality, this model produces completely different results even when beginning with the very same starting seeds and parameters because of the attempt to also make the seed random. This is not even as sophisticated as SimCity, which is really questionable. This is where the Imperial College claims that the errors will vanish if you run it on an old system in single-threaded mode as if you were using a 1980s XT.
The only REASONABLE conclusion I can reach is that this has been deliberately used to justify bogus forecasts intent for political activism, or I must accept that these academics are totally incapable of even creating a theoretical model no less coding it as a programmer. There seems to have been no independent review of Ferguson’s work which is unimaginable!
A 15,000 line program is nothing.
Read more here
Martin Armstrong
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/i-have-reviewed-fergusons-code/
